Photo of me, Kyle Summers

Hi there, I'm Kyle.

I am a student and web developer,
as well as an aspiring Software Engineer and entrepreneur.


Education

I am an undergraduate student studying Computer Science at the University of Michigan's College of Engineering. I've also been pursuing a minor in Spanish Language, Literature, and Culture. I will graduate in December 2014.

During my time at U-M, I have been involved in student government, two research projects, and I co-founded two student organizations.

Research

I have served as a research assistant for projects involving web application development.

During the summer of 2010, I contributed to a research project that resulted in the Mobile Participation System. This system was created by Ari Chivukula and myself and is a software-based student response system for use by universities. I co-authored a paper on this system, which won the John A. Curtis Lecture Award for the best paper in the Computers in Education Division at the 118th ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.

During the summer of 2011, I worked as a Web Application Developer for the Michigan Interactive & Social Computing research group at U-M's School of Information, where I contributed to the Rumors project. The project was designed to analyze tweets on Twitter to determine whether or not they appear to be rumors and to provide users with feedback on the legitimacy of information, including sources that correct misinformation. The project is focused on political rumors. I developed a Firefox browser extension designed to color code tweets in one's Twitter timeline based on whether or not an algorithm (server-side) determines that they are rumor-like.


Leadership

Student Government

I became involved with the U-M Central Student Government in November 2009, when I was elected as a representative to the legislature. I was subsequently elected for two additional terms, during the second of which I was appointed to become Chief of Staff for the 2011-2012 academic year. During my tenure with CSG, I worked on two different web applications, namely UPetition and the airBus Online Reservation Management System (ORMS), which have both been quite successful.

Michigan Hackers

Michigan Hackers logoIn February of 2012, I co-founded Michigan Hackers, a student organization at the University of Michigan. I served as Vice President of Operations from April 2012 to January 2013. My friends and I saw a void in the fabric of the EECS community at U-M and founded Michigan Hackers to foster the hacker culture on campus. The organization hosts tech talks, hackathons, weekly Hack Nights, among other events. In February of 2013, Michigan Hackers kicked off the inaugural MHacks, the largest student-run hackathon in the country, which had more than 500 students attend from across the U.S. and Canada.

Me, with a constructed Mario block over my head on the U-M Central Campus Diag
Photo of me with a radio earpiece in at MHacks
Photo of myself with the rest of the Michigan Hackers executive board at MHacks: Impact, wearing the event t-shirts

Creators Co-Op

Creators Co-Op logoIn February 2013, I co-founded the Creators Co-Op, a live-in collaborative space for high-potential student entrepreneurs. We're working to provide an engaging non-academic space where students can collaborate with one another, develop themselves personally and professionally, and build out their ideas. We're thankful to have Dhani Jones as our main mentor and benefactor. I serve as the Engineering Lead for the organization, where I work to contribute a technical perspective and skillset.

Photo of myself with Dhani Jones and the other Creators Co-Op leadership team members

Experience

Barracuda Networks

I have interned twice for Barracuda Networks. During the summer of 2012, I worked at their Campbell, CA headquarters on the Spam & Anti-Virus Firewall team. I introduced additional controls in the UI so that customers could exercise greater control over tiered settings. For summer 2013, I worked at their Ann Arbor office on the Barracuda Message Archiving Service (BMAS) team, developing a performance monitoring and analytics system. I used Apache Cassandra as the data store and wrote a tool in JavaScript for live monitoring and historical analysis of data.

Web Development

Stack Overflow badge

I began teaching myself about web technologies when I was 11. Since then I've worked on several web applications for freelance, personal and research projects. I am knowledgeable with the following technologies: XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, Linux, Apache, Nginx, and Node.js. jQuery is my JavaScript library of choice. I am generally quite good at making things functional, but not always aesthetically pleasing — I'm working on that, though. I strive for a high level of usability, accessibility, and responsiveness.

The following is a non-exhaustive list of projects, services, APIs, etc. that I have an appreciation for (in no particular order):


Projects

U-M Central Student Government

Screenshot of the Create Petition page on the UPetition website

UPetition

I've developed two extensive web applications for the U-M Central Student Government. Both were developed on a LAMP stack (with PHP). The first is an online petition system, designed to facilitate campus activism, which has attracted 50+ petitions and 20,000+ users over 3 years.

Screenshot of a reservation page on the CSG airBus website

airBus Online Reservation Management System (ORMS)

The second is an online reservation system for student airport transit, which is saving the organization between $7,000-$10,000 per year in ticketing fees, and which served 4,900+ customers in its first semester. The application is used to reserve seats on a bus service to the airport for University breaks. I integrated it with the University's single sign-on service called CoSign for authentication and authorization.

Hackathons

Screenshot of the Social Jam Facebook application

Facebook Camp Hackathon – April 2011

In March 2011, I had an awesome time participating in Facebook's Camp Hackathon at the University of Michigan with Brian Ford, Sharon Lee and Andrew Robinson. After 24 hours of programming (and the occasional RipStick joy ride), our team won the grand prize at the Michigan competition with a Facebook application we created called Social Jam. Social Jam allows Facebook users to collaboratively compose music with their friends. In December 2011, we went on to the Hackathon Finals at Facebook's (then) headquarters in Palo Alto, CA. There we competed against teams from across the U.S. and Canada.

Photo of my other hackathon teammates and I standing around a Michigan sign at the Hackathon Finals

Facebook Hackathon Finals – December 2011

After my team won first place at Facebook's Camp Hackathon at Michigan, we went to their Palo Alto headquarters in December 2011. There we competed against about 14 other universities across the U.S. and Canada in the Hackathon Finals. Our team developed another Facebook app based off of the classic Guess Who game, which provided an interface through which to play Guess Who with another Facebook user from one's set of mutual friends. It presented some of Facebook's Social Graph data about each user to encourage questions about those characteristics, with the hope that game players might have the opportunity to learn a bit more about their Facebook friends.

Greylock Hackfest – July 2012

In July 2012, I participated in Greylock's Hackfest. There I hacked solo to build an application to facilitate virtual programming office hours. My thought was that office hours for programming courses are fairly low-tech, consisting of a graduate student instructor (or "TA" at many universities) being available in a computer lab where students use a whiteboard as a queueing system for help with their project questions.

I built a browser-based code review application that consists of the open-source Ace text editor library written in JavaScript. It syncs interactions with the code — mouse movements, cursor movements, selection of text, insertions and deletions — between the instructor and student. My ultimate goal was to incorporate video/text chat and seamless file handling. The file handling would consist of integration with the Dropbox API (and/or Google Drive or Box) for near real-time synchronizations of code being edited in a client-side editor/IDE and the app. Diffs of the code between file saves that are picked up by the storage services could be made available through the app. It would also use HTML5 drag-and-drop file upload as an alternative to using Dropbox, et al. I plan to continue developing this hack and put it in use for students at U-M. I will likely switch to using CodeMirror for the editor as I think it has a better architecture to interface with.


Résumé

You can find my résumé here.










Contact Me

Feel free to connect with me elsewhere online or send me an email at kjs@kylejsummers.com.

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